Low-power communication protocols for wireless networks provide mechanisms for mobile devices to periodically sleep to conserve power and to wake up at a specific time to communicate with peer mobile devices. The mobile devices wake up regularly to participate in these communications. As the density of mobile devices increases, however, not all devices can participate in every slot of discovery and communication due to short durations of the slots and due to collisions that can be caused by contention.
Discovery and communication related transmissions of the mobile devices can be randomly distributed over a range of slots (referred to herein as “discovery slots”). Random distribution of the transmissions, however, may cause every mobile device to participate over a large range of discovery slots. Additionally, the random distribution may cause some mobile devices to participate over all discovery slots. Accordingly, randomly distributing the discovery and communication related transmissions of the mobile devices may not conserve power and may not reduce contention in the discovery slots.